


they say we're out of control and some say we're sinners

by Dialux



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: (??? no idea if that's a thing), Alien Biology, Alien Morality, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Historical Inaccuracy, M/M, Mutual Pining, Tenderness, Wing Grooming, again... to a certain extent, aziraphale is trying is hardest and it isn't working... a 20k story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-19 15:30:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19976374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialux/pseuds/Dialux
Summary: He fights the urge to shift or do something even more moronic. Like throw his own goblet at Crowley’s head and disappear on another eighty-year sabbatical.You cannot run away fromallyour problems,Aziraphale tells himself sternly, before he lifts his gaze to Crowley’s black-glassed ones.





	1. outstretched dirty hands just like a child

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from "Fire on fire," by Sam Smith. Poem from the beginning can be found [here.](https://madeleinewitt.tumblr.com/post/179675406705/130-read-all-30)
> 
> Warnings for mentions of discorporation, suicidal tendencies, depression, murder, etc. Funnily enough, I think this might be one of very few fics I've written without familial angst!

_a comfort-_  
_we are not_  
_the beginning,_  
_or the end;_  
_and what we are building_  
_has always_  
_been built_

_..._

“I AM HAVING A MOMENT HERE,” snarls Crowley, and Aziraphale sees the wildness in his golden snake-eyes, and his heart- his incorporeal, terrified, all-too-human heart- twangs.

 _Oh,_ he thinks.

…

He is fairly young for an angel. Eden is his first proper assignment; he’d formed a few things before that, most notably a frog in South America with clear skin and visible kidneys [1]. His Head Office had been impressed enough with that to give him a post on earth. 

When he first meets Crawly, he feels… something.

He’s the first non-human person he sees after Gabriel gives him the sword, and Crawly’s _funny,_ in a biting manner that makes Aziraphale want to say a little too much. He’s smart, too, and questioning, and though Aziraphale leaves the conversation uncomfortable and bitter along his tongue, he feels conversely _more_ comfortable in his own skin. Aziraphale doesn’t need to be anything other than what he is, because he’s an angel and Crawly’s a demon and those lines are inextricable, no matter what else changes in the universe.

He spreads his wing over Crawly’s head, and names it kindness.

(There is a reason, Aziraphale thinks later- almost too late- that honesty is not one of the seven heavenly virtues.)

…

Honesty has never been one of his strengths.

Perhaps that’s where Aziraphale and Crawly fit: the lies he tells his Head Office, the lies Crawly tells his, and all the lies both of them tell themselves.

…

So many times after that, Aziraphale meets him. Once he’s finished with the debacle of Noah and his Ark, he actually stopped measuring time in human-years and start measuring it in time-since-meeting-Crawly. It’s easier, in it’s own way, because it’s with him that Aziraphale’s world brightens, hones, sharp-edged and shining like sunlight off a sword of Damascus steel [2]. He’d drift along for the years between and live, really _live,_ for those moments when Crawly drifts up to him with his sweet, venomous humor and sliding, slitted eyes. 

Aziraphale doesn’t seek him out.

That’s important to state: Aziraphale doesn’t seek him out.

It’s not in his job description. But what _is_ in his job description is the need to fend off evil, and so he follows the whispers of darkness and malice and a hundred other tiny, measured steps towards the Other Side until he finds Crawly. He stops him, sometimes, and finds himself stopped at others, and slowly he learns to let the sour taste of defeat drift away under the taste of wine drunk with another immortal being by his side. 

…

Time passes. Six thousand years is a long time. 

Aziraphale fights him. He does, he _does,_ but Crawly is wily and funny and more often than not he finds himself throwing words at him instead of steel, and even more dangerously, giving him a hand up when the battle is done and finished. 

…

Alexandria burns, and he- oh, how Aziraphale blazes as well.

He may have learned to appreciate the taste of defeat, but this? There is nothing in this loss but _loss,_ empty dust and smoke and the vacuum of space. His wings unfurl, diamond white, and his wrath lifts him to the skies, and though he has no sword the flash of War’s red hair flickers around the corners of his vision. He flies, hunting after the scent of evil and loam [3] that is Crawly. He _flies,_ so furious that he cannot breathe for his rage.

He’s an angel, after all. He need not breathe.

And- there. _There._ Damp earth and smoke and hellfire. He throws himself forwards and land, and flame sings out around him. Crawly doesn’t move from his position on the ground- he’s a dark shadow, head tilted up to meet Azirphale’s gaze, unflinching.

“Demon,” he hisses.

“Aziraphale,” he says evenly, and oh, that’s bloody unfair. The way he looks, eyes like black coals, face sharpened to a knife’s edge. “War.”

War slides out from behind his back, red hair fanning out. “Crawly,” she murmurs, tongue sliding around the syllables like a caress. “It has been a long time.”

“Enjoying Rome?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Enough,” says Aziraphale, so low it makes the earth shudder. He forces himself to calm enough that he can speak without destroying the world. “You burned the library.”

“I did not.”

“You _lie,”_ he snarls.

Crawly lifts an eyebrow. “Did I pour pitch over the stone and strike the tinder? No, Aziraphale, I did not.”

“You made Caesar do it!”

“The fire was supposed to stay in the upper half of the city,” he says evenly. “It spread when there were riots.”

His fingers curl inwards, turn into claws. “All those lives,” says Aziraphale, a scream caught in his chest. “How _dare_ you?”

“Are you deaf or stupid?” asks Crawly, starting to sound annoyed. “What did I literally just say? I’m not _responsible_ for it!”

“Do you know how many books were in that library?”

Something flashes across Crawly’s face, some hard, flinty look. “And now we come to it,” he says, voice gone dark. He steps towards Aziraphale- just one step.

(Later, decades later, Aziraphale reflects on the courage it must have taken him to do that; he’s an angel in full form, golden-winged and dripping molten light onto the sand, and Crowley’s still in his human skin. Discorporation- apart from all the paperwork- is truly painful. But right then all Aziraphale knows is anger and grief and all the grief feeding the anger into something too large to be contained by his skin.)

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t care about the people, angel,” he says coldly. “You care about the books that burned. You tell me which one’s worse- setting the fire that burned the Library, or not caring about the people who died along the way for it?”

Electricity flips through Aziraphale’s veins, fueled by the outrage. “So you admit it,” he says.

“No,” says Crawly deliberately slowly. “I just want you to know how fucking stupid you’re being.”

War cackles aloud.

The fragments of Aziraphale’s patience snap.

He lunges forwards, glittering and golden, and Crawly’s wings snap out, blacker and larger than his. Sand whirls up around Aziraphale, buffets him backward. It stops him for just long enough that Crawly can tense his knees, and then Aziraphale’s twisting and fighting and rolling in both sand and air, desperate for some upper hand. He is terrified. He is furious. He is-

Crawly’s hands catch on his wings and yank.

Everything goes still.

It isn’t pain. Just the threat of it. The promise.

Aziraphale gasps, but even that stutters in his chest because too much movement and the feathers will be _gone,_ and while he can survive discorporation he isn’t sure at all about the wings. So he just tips his head back and looks at Crawly, whose red hair shines out, bright and cutting. His face is narrow and cold and Aziraphale can see the sun behind him, throwing all of him into shadow, silhouetting him like an angel’s halo.

“Finish it,” whispers War. _“Finish it,_ demon.”

Aziraphale thinks- he will. He looks at Crawly, and he’s certain that he will. He must, surely he must. His eyes don’t move, and he looks terrifying, golden and shadowed, beautiful and horrifying. Aziraphale chokes. He thinks- wildly- of begging, but there are no words inside of him. Only silence, vast and unending, and anger being banked into an ocean too cold to maintain its flames.

He looks up, into Crawly’s eyes. He can feel the strain in his wings. He does not dare to move. His face is all he can see: the narrow slide of his jaw, the curl of one lock of hair. The golden, gleaming slant of his eyes. And then something ripples across his face- not kindness, not softness, and yet an emotion wholly encompassing both.

The moment passes.

Crawly lets go, fingers lifting one by one, and backs away swiftly. He massages one hand with the other, as if wondering at the ache, even as Aziraphale stumbles to his feet. He sees the way Crawly cuts his gaze towards War.

“Wrath’s not really my speed,” he drawls, voice calmer than it has any right to be. “Pride, gluttony- sloth! Sloth’s done some real wonders for humanity, and by wonders I mean horrors. I’m sure you understand.”

 _Mercy,_ thinks Aziraphale, wondering. _From a demon’s hands._

War’s eyes are narrowed. She looks furious- but then, when doesn’t she? Though Aziraphale supposes that he ought to find her twitching fingers slightly worrisome.

Crawly keeps nattering on. “I’ll sleep one of these centuries. You know, that might be the best vacation ever. Quietly hide out in a cave… let the darkness take me for a good hundred years… not have to deal with meddling angels or annoying horsepeople…”

“I’m not a horseperson,” snarls War, who’s technically just that. “And you could have started Armageddon here, you know that? Right here. Right now.”

“What, without the Antichrist?” Crawly asks incredulously. “D’you know how many forms I’d have to fill for even _thinking_ about it?” His voice slips into a slightly higher register. “Yes, Your Disgrace, I don’t think we need your son to cause the end of the world- no, all it takes is, you know, ripping out an angel’s wings. We can start the end of the world right away, if you’d be okay with not playing a leading role!” He inhales, and seems to lengthen with that breath a good foot. Maybe two. “Got to say, War, you need to work on your tempting. Not too persuasive there.”

“Crawly,” Aziraphale scrapes out, and see his whole body not-flinch, instead doing a peculiar wiggle that leaves his shoulders almost above his ears. Aziraphale walks forwards, feet dragging against the sand, and forces himself not to notice the way he goes so still Aziraphale could likely push him over with a finger. Slowly, wincing through the ache, he lifts a hand and places it on his shoulder. “Let her go.”

He spins to look, jumpy and _angry,_ like a piece of metal that’s sparking on one end with heat. “I’m not the one keeping her here,” he says sharply. 

“Oh,” says Aziraphale.

“Yes, _oh,”_ says Crawly, mockingly high. 

Aziraphale brought her here. He is keeping her here, with the bloodlust that sings beneath his skin and deep into his muscle. War circles both of them still- the promise of it lessened but still present. He closes his eyes and breathes.

Smoke and char. Dust. Crawly, as always, like flame and the scorched earth that follows. The blood and screams of War. He opens his eyes and there is little peace in Aziraphale’s heart, but the fury has abated. He hasn’t forgiven anyone of anything; he is too tired, too marveling, to do that. Then he opens his eyes and War is gone, as if she had never been there.

“Good riddance,” says Crawly, lips twisting in distaste. “Never did like her much. _Finish it, demon._ As if that’s all I am.”

“Indeed,” says Aziraphale faintly. “You’re… far more interesting than that.”

“I’d bloody well hope so.” He hesitates. His fingers twitch, but remain at his sides. “You need some help? You don’t look- too good.”

Aziraphale sways, but maintains his balance, which he decides is good enough. Has to be good enough. “Scrapes and bruises,” he says, waving a hand. “I’ll be fine.”

Crawly leaves, then, and Aziraphale forces himself to keep walking. One step in front of another. Miracles keeping him awake, though he doesn’t use one to ensure he doesn’t topple over. The sun sears his eyes. But all he sees through the brightness is Crawly: golden, dark, compassion in his gaze and that one moment when all words had failed Aziraphale and he’d lain there, helpless. That one moment when Aziraphale ought to have been more terrified than ever before in all his existence, and all he’d felt was a queer, silently overwhelming sensation instead. That one moment he’d trusted Crawly, despite the glitter of War in his hair.

…

Dangerous. Because Aziraphale is young, and he is good, and Crawly is not. He is a demon. Aziraphale is an angel. There are inextricable lines there, and Aziraphale will not let what he is be changed by anyone, for anything. He is Aziraphale the Angel, who once bore a flaming sword and guarded the Garden of Eden. Brightness sings in him in the place of his blood.

And yet-

…

(Aziraphale meets Crawly once after that, and Crawly doesn’t look at him, just tosses a bag in his vague direction and flees. Aziraphale opens it that night and see an array of things: oil, tweezers, a curved tool that is likely to help with itchy feathers. Warmth blooms in his chest. He doesn’t thank Crawly, the next time they meet, and Crawly doesn’t mention it, but never after is War invoked between the two of them.)

…

There was a druid in Gaul with eyes the color of amber, like embers on the verge of flames. Aziraphale’d lived with him for a short time and he’d loved him, in his way [4], at least until he woke up to sunlight slanting over the man’s face, throwing it into sharp-edged shadows.

 _Cro,_ Aziraphale sighs, a mush-mouthed syllable, before his brain catches up to his mouth and terror and shame swirl up his guts like hot lava.

It’s not the longest he’s ever avoided Crawly, those years after meeting that druid, but they are the ones in which Aziraphale’s done his utmost to keep him at bay; any rumor of evil or petty crime or cruelty and he _runs_ in the opposite direction. It means Aziraphale’s effectively terrible at his job. It also means that he travels the world for a good eighty years- he sees, in that time: Pataliputra, Xi’an, Asahi, Deen Maar, Napata. He meets more people; eats different foods; does exciting things. The travel itself is exhausting but-

Good.

It’s drowning, yes, but in a good way. And Aziraphale is, if nothing else, the earth’s oldest definer of good.

It’s not the longest he’s avoided Crawly, perhaps, but it is the most successful he’s ever been in avoiding even thinking about him. It’s not until he’s forced back by a flustered angel, constantly muttering on the flight from Australia to some dusty alley in Jerusalem about how there’s an _urgent matter_ and _policy from on high_ and _oh, good Lord, you’ve missed far too much-_

He’s miracled into the city and given three hours to not only find different clothes, learn a new language, and understand _what_ that decision is that the angel hadn’t been able to shut up about, all the while refusing to describe it in anything less than the vaguest of terms- but also to get his dusty, mind-numbed body to that hill. Which isn’t all that close to the city. By the time he gets there, he’s lost all patience and has had tired resignation poured into his veins instead.

Then Aziraphale turns and _his_ eyes meets his, and something snaps deep in Aziraphale’s chest like a little twig. Sun and sand and golden eyes, brighter than any metal in his sword or fire running across it [5]. _You rather like him,_ thinks Aziraphale, despite the sharpness of his face and the tartness of his tongue and the decades he’s spent not thinking about this exact- issue [6].

 _No,_ he thinks, and he’s just tired enough to feel the resignation, though he certainly don’t have the energy to be truthful on the actual issue. _This is. A little more… complex._

Crawly’s eyes remind Aziraphale of the sun, of honey, of buttery flowers blossoming in Eden. Of Gabriel’s light, the parts that aren’t too bright to be called colorful, but he knows that if he ever say that part aloud Crawly will probably self-combust from the rage. His face is like a hatchet, chin sharp and cheeks hollowed, but it’s a good look on him. His gait is still snake-like (it becomes worse when men’s fashion starts on jeans- they suit him, the two-faced bastard, and he _knows_ it), and when he sits he sprawls like he’s forgotten quite how his joints are supposed to bend.

None of it should be even vaguely appealing.

 _All_ of it is.

And Aziraphale is… lonely. He has loved humans, he has loved multiple humans; he has lain with them and watched them bear children and loved those as well, he has buried them and mourned them and once, memorably, watched them be born. But there is no one else in all the universe that has watched humanity as Aziraphale has, and there is no one else that has existed through the dark times and the bright quite like Aziraphale and Crawly. Crowley. Whatever. His name changes little of what he is- sly, and wily, and brilliant like a too-bright sunrise.

He inhales, heat and blood heavy in the air, to speak. To offer- something. Lunch, maybe, or wine, or just quiet company under the cloudy sky. But when Aziraphale turns, he’s gone. There is nothing there, just the smell of smoke and damp earth that’s swiftly carried away by the wind. 

When next Aziraphale meets Crowley- a restaurant in Rome- _Aziraphale_ goes up to _him._

It is not quite as frightening as he’d feared it to be, though he’s just as stupidly awkward about it all.

…

Not that too much changes after that. Aziraphale fights him, sometimes, and follow him, others, and if he lets himself smile a little too wide in the hours that Aziraphale’s next to him, who would blame him? Demons don’t smile, everyone knows that. They just bare their teeth. Aziraphale’s trying to frighten him off in a language he’ll understand. He’s _smart_ about it all. 

Who would question that?

…

New Year’s, about sixty years following their meeting in Wessex. Aziraphale’s outside and laying on a straw roof, so cold he’d probably be dead if he were human. But he’s miracled a clear sky for himself instead of the planned storm and the stars are liquid-bright and shining above him. There’s good wine in Aziraphale’s flask, probably frozen solid. He has a good life, of a sort, right then- he’s a monk, and though he isn’t made for the ascetic life, there’s something refreshing in the novelty of denial anyhow.

“Aziraphale,” says a voice that he knows far too well.

He turns and looks. There’s no human-figure around, but a glowing scarlet aura looped around a bundle of straw that shines like wildfire. Aziraphale looks closer and sees a shadowy little snake, striped black and gold.

“Crowley,” he says, puzzled. “What are you doing here?”

“No greeting?” he asks, drawing tighter on himself. “Really?”

Aziraphale frowns. There’s something very strange in the way that Crowley’s coiled in on himself. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” hisses Crowley. “I just don’t know why I’m- _here.”_

“Well,” says Aziraphale. “You don’t look fine.”

“I am fine,” says Crowley, and he rises up, snake-neck trembling, to glare at Aziraphale with eyes that are too familiar. There’s also a dripping gash down his entire body, black matter slowly staining and spreading over his scales.

Aziraphale cries out and reaches for it before stilling and looking at him, hands fluttering in the air like distressed birds. “You don’t look fine,” he says. _“Crowley,_ you look like you’re going to be discorporated!”

“Yes, yes, it’s worse than it looks. I’m healing.”

“You don’t look it!”

“Which is why it’s _worse_ than it looks,” he says impatiently. “Anyways. I didn’t come here to worry you.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know why you were here.”

“I- lied.”

“Crowley-”

“We meet up every century,” says Crowley. “And I brought the wine last time. It’s your turn. Did you think I’d forget?” Then, without letting Aziraphale so much as breathe, “Please tell me that isn’t homemade. These monks are the kind to let mushrooms grow on milk and bottle the fumes for money. I’m _not_ drinking that.”

“No, no, it’s from Rome.” From the Great Fire, which had taken quite a few miracles to achieve. Aziraphale’s been saving it for something good. Which he finds is perfect for this: a cold winter night, Crowley beside him, and love like wings curling around his shoulders. “You’ll like it.”

Crowley lets his snakes’ tongue flick into the wine. “Mmm,” he says. Something loosens in his body, at least enough for him to rest, warm and rough, against Aziraphale’s side. “Really good stuff, that. Better than anything they have down there.” 

His tail flickers, turning into an arrow that echoes a pitchfork. 

“Is that where you’ve been?” asks Aziraphale, curious though he knows he shouldn’t be. “Down… there?”

“Satan’s under the impression we don’t have enough drama in our lives,” says Crowley flatly. Aziraphale takes a drink of the wine, miracles it warm. Feels it slide down his throat. The faint aftertaste of hellfire sings out, vivid, and he doesn’t mind it one bit. “He wants to shake up everything. Move demons around. We’re all getting too comfortable, apparently, and nobody’s job’s safe.”

Aziraphale stretches out, limbs soft and easy. “We get promotions up there,” he says. 

“Too orderly for us,” says Crowley. “Or, how do you lot put it? Too fucking diligent, I suppose.”

“I always assumed you’d have to kill anyone above you to get a promotion down there,” says Aziraphale.

Crowley laughs, stunned into sound. “You’re not- entirely- wrong.” He doesn’t gasp it, not exactly, but there’s a hitch to his breathing that makes the hairs on the back of Aziraphale’s neck stand up. 

“Don’t turn discorporeal on me now,” says Aziraphale, and his voice is harsher than he’s ever heard it before. “And- why _you?”_

Crowley’s head slips to the side, annoyed. “Morons think I want to return to Hell. Become an- archdemon, or whatever.”

Aziraphale’d felt a knot in his chest at Jesus’ crucifixion, Crowley dark and tall next to him, and he feels it again now- needles sliding under his skin, far colder than the snow. Aziraphale is an angel and Crowley is a demon, and those lines are inextricable. For all that Aziraphale will feel grief, he won’t stop Crowley from leaving. Not if it’s his choice. Aziraphale is an angel, and he cannot forget that, and yet-

“And do you? Want to return?”

Crowley inhales loudly, exhales loudly. He blinks one large golden eye. He says, voice labored, “The wine down there’s absolute shit. Better up here. And- I rather like the quiet. The space. The. You know. Lack of shit.”

“Well, then,” says Aziraphale. Some part of him feels wobbly, like a newborn colt, but the rest of him feels weirdly calm. “Perhaps I can be of assistance?”

“What… do you mean?”

“Unholy weapon did that to you, yes?”

“A sword forged in hellfire,” agrees Crowley. His tongue flicks out and takes a drop of wine, before he arches up to rest on Aziraphale’s thigh. 

Aziraphale reaches out, slowly enough for him to pull away if he wants. Runs his fingers over the golden ribbon of Crowley’s scales. Touches the blackened edge that’s cut open, leaking matter that would be blood in a human. It will take a miracle that he’s certain anyone up above would disapprove of, but Crowley is _Crowley,_ and Aziraphale is an angel with magic dripping from his fingers, and that is all that matters right now.

“I can heal you,” says Aziraphale softly.

Crowley looks up, moving too sluggishly. Worry sparks in Aziraphale’s throat, but he tamps it down. Stares at him instead. Waits.

“Very well then,” he says, after a long pause, voice unsteady. Aziraphale hesitates still- unsure of where to touch- and Crowley’s tail twitches viciously. “Get on with it, angel.”

“Patience,” murmurs Aziraphale, and trails his fingers over the scales. 

Gold sparks over it and for the briefest of heartbeats both of them are awash in light as bright as the sun at high noon. Then it fades, and all that remains is a long streak of reddish white on scales that had once been black as pitch. 

“That does feel better,” says Crowley, flexing. “I wonder…”

He shifts into human form and something creaks ominously. Aziraphale opens his mouth to warn him; Crowley swipes the flask out of his hand. 

“Crowley,” says Aziraphale slowly, rolling the syllables around his mouth like he’s brazing it in honey. “Do you… know who did this to you?”

He jerks, reflexively, and gets “Balth-” out of his mouth before there’s another crack. There’s only just enough time for Aziraphale to get his wings out and launch himself into the air before the roof caves in. And then he looks down, hovering, and Crowley’s a disheveled, straw-laden mess, clutching the wine-flask upside down and looking absolutely distraught. 

Aziraphale isn’t actually certain what’s going to come out of his mouth, then- it’s all a mess inside of him, anger and fear and worry like thick molasses down his throat [7]. But what erupts is _laughter,_ so loud he almost instinctively look over his shoulder, and now his stomach’s aching from it, and his lungs are breathless, and it has been far, far too long since he last laughed so deep as this.

“Bugger it,” snarls Crowley. He looks up at Aziraphale, eyes flashing so gold and rich that Aziraphale feels it expand inside of him like a blooming flower. “Bugger you, too, you- you _angel-”_

“I am an angel, Crowley,” says Aziraphale, and slides down to catch his hand and pull him up, still gasping a little. “That’s what I am. How else did you think I healed you?”

Crowley pulls away sharply, but doesn’t do anything other than brush himself off more vigorously than necessary. Aziraphale grins at him, and in the dim light of the stars he thinks he can see a curve to his lips as well. Quietly, Aziraphale miracles himself the spilled wine back into the flask and pours it into a small cup. Crowley startles when Aziraphale hands it to him.

“What-”

“To the seventh century,” says Aziraphale, holding the flask aloft. “May we make our people proud.”

Something hoods over Crowley’s eyes, dark and cold, but he does lift the cup. “To _us,”_ he says, and his voice rings with a savage echo. “And another five thousand years here, and nowhere else.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Aziraphale says, and nudges him, and watches with faint satisfaction as the rage in Crowley’s face is replaced with his customary sardonic glare. 

Long past when the sun ought to rise, it remains dark. Aziraphale suspects a miracle from Crowley’s side; but he doesn’t say anything about it. Just passes the flask to Crowley and accepts it back from him, barely speaking, and welcomes another century to the earth.

…

Demons cannot love. Is it not the very antithesis of their being, to love when all of what they are made is hate and greed and darkness? And Aziraphale- Aziraphale is a being of love, created by it and for it, and so all of what he feels with Crowley must be simply that: the love of an angel for those who have walked beside him for six thousand years. Companionship. Kindness. Compassion. He doesn’t expect anything back, because how can he? Crowley is a demon, and Aziraphale is an angel; that is inextricable. And so the love lives on, silent and undimmed, a flame in his heart.

…

Aziraphale’s got enough on his hands keeping the peace in the ruins of Belgrade when a black-visaged man stalks up to him and catches his collar.

Before Aziraphale can so much as react, the man’s shifted his grip to a stronger one and dragged him further back into the shadows of the alley. He sputters, drags himself up, and the taut pressure across his shoulders eases just enough that he’s not worried about a strained muscle.

“Hey,” says Crowley, a mutter just low enough for him to hear. 

Aziraphale recoils, smashing his head against the stone of the building and hissing at the new pain. _“Crowley,”_ he hisses, rage building up through his throat. “Is that- I should’ve- _what are you doing here?”_

“Calm down,” he replies, voice going even lower and tenser. “And shut up.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale warns. “Is this you?”

“Is _what_ me?”

“The- Zemun.”

Aziraphale’d joined the People’s Crusade for no reason other than that he thought it his job to keep the already-inflamed tempers of the peasants from being inflamed further. It hadn’t worked as he hoped: when he wandered off to heal a girl with weeping sores on her hands, he’d returned to see half the Crusaders pillaging Zemun and following it up with an even worse pillaging of Belgrade just across the river, all the natives having abandoned the city after hearing of how vicious the Crusaders could be.

Crowley sends Aziraphale a look over the tops of his glasses that’s clearly visible even in the dark alley. “No,” he says, and he sounds just as deliberately, infuriatingly patronizing as he had in the Egyptian desert. “I’ve been. You know. A little busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Oh. This and that. A bit of tempting, bit of wiling, bit of running from some very stupid… agents.”

“Running?” Aziraphale asks dumbly.

His teeth flash, and then Crowley snakes around Aziraphale’s shoulders, fingers loosening on his lapels but shoulders crowding Aziraphale further against the wall. “Found ‘em out a few days ago. Didn’t expect to be seeing you here, though. Fancy that.”

“My side?” asks Aziraphale slowly, fearing the worst.

“Mmm. Someone’s side, at least. Have holy water, and aren’t afraid to use it.”

“I’m assuming that’s bad.”

“Saw it happen to a demon once.” Crowley shudders. “Discorporation isn’t it. It’s. Death. Final. For demons.”

“So it’s angels doing it.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “Or some very stupid demons.”

And yet, for all his bravado- Aziraphale can see the way his skin’s greyed out under the aura he’s projecting. His face had always been sharp, but never this hollow. Never this emaciated. Their bodies don’t need sleep or food like humans, but they are not tireless- using miracles can drain them. And even that shouldn’t have put this particular look on Crowley’s face, all hunted and wild.

“How’d you find out?” 

Aziraphale’s suspicions are confirmed when Crowley inhales, wet and gasping, like it hurts. “I was… taking a day off. Relaxing. Next thing I know there’s two _idiots_ in the room, taking shots at me with a bunch of daggers.” His fingers twitch. “They got my wings.”

“Crowley,” breathes Aziraphale. 

“It’ll be fine. I just need. A minute.”

“I’ve got a room,” he says impulsively. “An inn, not too far from here. If you need a little more than a minute, that is.”

“That hasn’t been burned down?”

“I _am_ an angel. Miracles are my thing.”

“Believe me,” he mutters. “I can’t forget.”

“Can you walk?” 

His face spasms. “Can I _walk?_ How’d you think I got here, crawling? Slithering, maybe, on my belly-” He looks at Aziraphale’s expression, all stricken and steadily turning furious, and something like an apology crosses his face. “Yes, I can do it.”

They stumble out of the alley, Crowley’s arm heavy around Aziraphale’s shoulders. For all his assurances, Aziraphale’s the one bearing the majority of his weight; and for all Aziraphale’s promises to himself not to care, he leans into that steady warmth. By the time they reach the inn, though, Crowley’s warmth has faded. He scarcely seems conscious. Aziraphale manages to get him up the stairs and tipped onto the bed, but he’s gone white as a sheet and cold; too cold. 

_He’s a snake,_ thinks Aziraphale, tapping his fingers against the inside of his wrist nervously. _Before he turned human, he was a- snake._

So maybe Aziraphale doesn’t need to worry overmuch. Maybe Crowley isn’t as close to discorporation as he suspects he is. But the very fact that he’s lost enough control to maintain even his body temperature- that makes fear flutter around Aziraphale’s chest like a shivering plant.

Mind made up, he lean forwards and presses his fingers to his chest. Right above where his heart would beat in a human. Aziraphale doesn’t ask this time- not that he could, not that Crowley can hear- but he thinks that even if he’d been awake and forced Aziraphale away, he’d not let him. Aziraphale would return. He would place his hand above Crowley’s heart, and he’d _make_ him better, because he _is_ an angel, he is an _angel,_ he is-

Well.

It scarcely matters what else Aziraphale is right now. He has magic in his fingers, and that is all that matters. He pours that down into Crowley’s chest, washing away the trembles and the paleness of his cheeks. He stops once Crowley’s muscles relax out of their rigidity, though he doesn’t lift his hand either- there’s something in the steady beat of Crowley’s heart that makes him soften, and a vicious fear underlying that that makes Aziraphale want to just… sit there. Listen. And breathe.

He tilts his head and listens with ears that don’t belong in the mortal plane. There’s the faint smell of smoke, and some screams; a few prayers that he soothes over. Nothing that Aziraphale can fix right away. No pressing duties. 

Slowly, Aziraphale sinks into a chair next to the bed, hand not moving. He curves over his arm, forehead warm against his forearm, and the _thud-thud-thud_ of Crowley’s heart drums against his fingers, unending and even and unfaltering. 

…

The next morning, Crowley makes a sharp, bitten-off sound and arches, curving off the bed at an angle that no human would manage. Aziraphale flinches upright, hand aching from the strange angle he’d left it in overnight. Crowley relaxes a moment later- before Aziraphale can so much as react- but he’s shaking, and his glasses have fallen off to reveal his eyes as wholly slitted and wild with some old, ancient fear.

“This shouldn’t be happening,” Aziraphale says, barely keeping his stammering out of his voice. “Crowley, I _healed_ you. You should be fine by now!”

“Not a physical problem, angel,” hisses Crowley, the long muscles in his legs alternately flexing and relaxing as if readying for another wave of pain. 

Aziraphale considers that. “Your wings, then?”

“Know any other part of me that’s metaphysical?”

“Crowley!”

“Yes, alright, it’s my wings. I told you they’re all ripped up. Fucking Balthazar and his _vendettas.”_

Aziraphale stills, heat licking at his ribs like proper flame. He knows that name. He feels the old anger, but bites his tongue instead of speaking. There is a time and place for righteous anger, and this- this is not it. When he speaks, his voice is level enough to act as an engineering instrument.

“They can’t be bleeding still.”

“I- no,” says Crowley, and there’s something miserable in the angles of his face. “They stopped doing that almost immediately. But I needed them [8]. So I just…” He waves a hand, some gruesome parody of flippancy. “You know. Miracled it better.”

 _“Crowley,”_ says Aziraphale, anger washed away by the abrupt fear. “That could’ve ruined them permanently!”

“Let’s hope that didn’t happen.”

“Well- what did you think about? With your miracle?”

“That I’d like my wings normal again,” says Crowley. “I don’t know. I was slightly delirious by then. Maybe- that I’d like my feathers back? ‘m not sure.”

“Open them.”

“What?” Crowley wrenches himself to the side, whole body coiling up. “Are you insane?”

 _“Open_ them,” Aziraphale repeats flatly. “If you asked for your feathers back and they didn’t return like they should’ve, you’ll need someone to help you with that. To put them back where… they belong. I wouldn’t- you shouldn’t try to fix it on your own.”

One golden eye rolls to study Aziraphale, with far too keen a look. “An angel’s mercy,” he drawls, biting, and Aziraphale fights to keep from letting the memory of the Egyptian desert overwhelm him. The trust he’d had, running beneath rage and hurt like a river remained unfrozen even when iced over the surface. The golden cast of Crowley’s eyes and the shine of his hair. The way he’d tensed his fingers, right after he’d clutched onto Aziraphale’s feathers, like he couldn’t quite believe what he’d done.

“Better you stay on earth than any other demon,” says Aziraphale quietly. “And. I’m not cruel, Crowley, I don’t want to see you in pain!” He breathes in quickly, sharply, before continuing. “So. Open them. I’ll- fix it. Then we’ll go find those… agents. Convince them to leave you alone. Then things’ll just- go back to normal [9].”

Crowley scoffs in the back of his throat, but he rolls himself over onto his front without any further complaints. His wings burst into being, black and shining, nearly taking Aziraphale out before he ducks away. When he regains his balance and looks- really looks- he can’t quite help the shocked gasp.

“That bad, huh?”

“Worse,” Aziraphale says faintly.

Then, gritting his teeth, he drags the chair back and settles in it as comfortably as he can. They’re going to be here for a while.

…

By the end of it, Crowley’s fallen asleep. He looks even more liquid than he usually does: all puddled spine and boneless limbs. Aziraphale takes a moment to admire the way his face looks in sleep- there’s the thinnest strip of yellow running under his lashes, and a patch of skin across his nose that sags where it doesn’t while he’s awake, and the faintest shadow of a beard under his jaw [10]. Aziraphale doesn’t enjoy sleep, not really, but he thinks he might if it were as relaxing as Crowley seems to find it.

Rolling his wrists, Aziraphale slumps back into the chair. He closes his eyes and- 

-a scream. A flickering candle. A feeling, cool and rapidly fading, that he hasn’t felt in too long-

A call to arms.

_Demons in the area._

“Oh,” he sighs. 

The strange sorrow in Aziraphale’s chest is both unwanted and unneeded. He doesn’t want to leave Crowley like this, defenseless and barely healed over. But Aziraphale is an angel, and he is on earth to do his duty. He’ll do what must be done.

 _Inextricable lines,_ thinks Aziraphale tiredly, and rises. _Ineffable plans._

He lingers in the doorway for a long moment. Wonders if there’s something more to do- a note, perhaps, or some food, or maybe even an address. For when this is all over. Then a flicker of a thought crosses his mind, wicked and amusing and wonderfully vengeful, and Aziraphale walks back to Crowley and grips his wrist loosely.

“You promised me another five thousand years, dear boy,” says Aziraphale, so quietly he can’t even hear himself as he lets go and backs away, unlocks the door and slips out of his own room. “Don’t you dare break that.”

…

[1] In the late twentieth century, the fashion craze for transparent electronics left Aziraphale warmly vindicated. It also left him in possession of an award from Head Office, for “being ahead of the curve by a record six thousand years.”

[2] Aziraphale has the recipe for Damascan steel somewhere in his bookstore. He’s kept very quiet about that, because when he told Crowley he knew how to make Greek fire, Crowley hadn’t shut up about it for a good three months and it had been… very irritating.

[3] A very peculiar smell. Not of Hell, and certainly not of Heaven. It reminds Aziraphale of the way the land smells after a rainstorm kills a fire; not pleasant but not unpleasant, and wholly unique to Florida’s Everglades.

[4] Which is to say that he was about as emotionally repressed as Aziraphale on a good day, and Aziraphale held his hand as he died.

[5] And just as sharp, which is just bloody _unfair._

[6] Aziraphale calls it an _issue_ because calling it anything else would be untrue. Except for _disaster,_ which while not untrue would make it something too dramatic, and Aziraphale hasn’t really liked the dramatic world all that much since he was first introduced to it in Dwaraka. Or _truth,_ because that- while also not untrue- implies he has the energy to tease out lies amidst the truth, and he absolutely does not. Or even _problem,_ because that implies something that needs to be solved, and this does not. Ever.

[7] The full name of the demon never comes out of Crowley’s mouth, but it doesn’t matter; Aziraphale knows the word Balthazar when he hears it. For the briefest of moments he’s certain that if he’d had his old sword right then, it would’ve flamed white, or perhaps even blue. Maybe hotter. So hot the stars themselves would melt before it. 

[8] The story behind Crowley needing the wings went something like this: Crowley was in a room cordoned off from the roof of the cathedral of the Hagia Sophia by demonic sigils, preening his wings. It’s one of about two dozen places he has scattered around the world for his own privacy. It’s also the reason he’s certain the agents following him are demonic- only a demon could walk through the door without being discorporated (in the case of angels) or incinerated (in the case of humans). He’d quite literally jumped out of the window a few minutes later- once he realized he didn’t have the firepower to get rid of them- and only remembered his ragged wings when he didn’t have any solid ground under his feet. His mental processes right then had been something approaching _“FEATHERS! NOW! NOW! FUCKING HELL I NEED FEATHERS-”_ which goes some way towards explaining how terribly the re-feathering of his wings had gone- primaries in the place of tertiary feathers, flight feathers instead of pins. Pain, really, and mistakes all around.

[9] Not… exactly, though Aziraphale does live in a world of perpetual hope.

[10] It isn’t about Crowley being handsome. It’s not. It _really_ isn’t.


	2. hungry little fool, but you were mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley looks up, at Aziraphale. His glasses have slipped; his eyes are slitted through and dimmed, like a kerosene flame on the verge of sputtering. The strip of skin along his nose that sags when he’s asleep looks soft, and tenderness swells inside Aziraphale like a rising wave. He doesn’t know what Crowley sees, only that Aziraphale’s masks have been torn asunder, only that Aziraphale would rather be worn and shattered than have Crowley discorporated and disappeared from his life. He doesn’t know what Crowley sees, but Crowley acquiesces without further argument.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for the alien biology tag, wherein Aziraphale, at least, has a very different outlook on discorporation than we humans do on suicide, and also a different outlook than Crowley has on discorporation as well. Re: his desperate fear of Crowley being discorporated... cognitive dissonance ftw? 
> 
> Lyrics from beginning come from "Things we lost to the fire" by Bastille, there should be a proper post on all the notes I've gathered on tumblr by the end of this fic, and I hope you enjoy!

_we were born with nothing_   
_and we sure as hell_   
_have nothing now_

_..._

Through a complex web of intermediaries, Aziraphale decides to meet Crowley in a little shop in Baghdad known for spicy bread and wonderful pistachio recipes [11] to welcome the twelfth century. Aziraphale actually gets there before Crowley; he orders himself a thick sort of soup and starts running through his mental catalog of wines that he knows Crowley’s stored away. The guessing of what he’ll get is almost the best part.

His eyes are closed when an arm closes over his shoulder.

“Angel,” says Crowley.

Aziraphale tilts his head to the side and smiles at him, takes in the sharp edge of his cheekbones that’s softened from the haggard cut of five years before. They both look much better, Aziraphale supposes, now that they aren’t in an active war zone.

“Crowley. It’s been some time.”

“Mmm. When was the last time we met?” There’s something glittering-amused in Crowley’s expression, an angle to his eyebrows, a smugness to his voice- that makes wariness curl down Aziraphale’s back. “Five years, I think. That mess up in Belgrade.”

“Oh, yes.” The wariness digs fine claws into Aziraphale’s spine. “I never did get the chance to ask you if you found those demons that were after you.”

“Never saw them again, actually.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Not really,” says Crowley casually. “Though I did hear a few strange rumors.”

“Did you?” 

“And saw a few disciplinary reports... that don’t add up.”

Aziraphale smiles thinly back at him. “Hell’s not known for its paperwork, I’d think.”

“Hell does take notice when a few demons become discorporated, though. And especially when done as- completely- as happened to those two.” His lip curls. “Their bodies were so badly off, headquarters couldn’t fix ‘em. Had to burn them up. Apparently.”

“It was that bad?” Aziraphale asks, alarmed. 

Crowley slouches into his seat, a jewel-encrusted goblet tipped far enough in his hand to dare the drink to spill. “Only... there was one strange thing.”

“Was there,” sighs Aziraphale.

“Those idiots kept babbling something about _me_ doing the actual act. Which doesn’t make sense, because as far as I remember, I was sleeping in a ridiculously overpriced room while Belgrade was being sacked.” 

Aziraphale folds his hands together tensely. “I’m sure your memory hasn’t gotten that bad, Crowley. Old age... there’s some newfangled ideas about _training your brain_ that ought to come up in a few centuries that-”

“My memory hasn’t gotten bad at all, angel,” says Crowley amusedly. “Perks of being immortal.”

“Well, then, I don’t-”

“Did you steal my face?” interrupts Crowley, leaning further forwards.

His face is so intent- it feels like Aziraphale’s skin is being pared away, revealing all those terrible emotions running under it. He fights the urge to shift or do something even more moronic. Like throw his own goblet at Crowley’s head and disappear on another eighty-year sabbatical.

 _You cannot run away from_ all _your problems,_ Aziraphale tells himself sternly, before he lifts his gaze to Crowley’s black-glassed ones.

“Just,” he says, “for a few hours.”

Sheer glee splits open Crowley’s face. And something else, chasing on its heels- something soft and wide and sharp. 

“And it was borrowed,” corrects Aziraphale sharply, desperate to keep that expression from erasing all thought in Aziraphale’s mind. “Not stolen. It’s not like I went about wearing your face after that.”

“Wouldn’t’ve been a problem if you did.”

_“Pardon me?”_

Crowley flicks his fingers and picks up the decadently-decorated wine bottle he’s just magicked up, rolling it between his fingers carelessly. There’s a faint smile on his lips. 

“I was just thinking,” he says. “What I tempt the humans into doing, you thwart. What you try to miracle into being good, I miracle into being bad. We, ah- cancel each other out.”

“We do our duty,” agrees Aziraphale. 

The wariness is back. It prowls up and down Aziraphale’s back like a cat, digging claws and sweeping tails over his spine. 

“But nobody down below knew that it was you,” says Crowley. “They couldn’t tell the difference between me doing something or you doing something. Demonic, angelic- it doesn’t matter. So long as the job gets done.”

“What _are_ you saying?”

“We do the work they want us to do. But if it’s in the same city- at the same time- one of us can do both. Tempting and thwarting. Make it easier on both of us.”

“Slothfulness,” says Aziraphale, as scornfully as he can fit in. “And _no.”_

“No?”

“No!”

“How long have we been here?” Crowley asks, and angles his face to the side, glasses slipping the barest bit to reveal eyes golden as the sunset around them. Aziraphale shudders internally, and prays fervently that he didn’t make the physical movement to match. “Five thousand years, give or take a decade. How many days off have you had?”

Aziraphale swallows, hard. He reaches out and seizes the bottle. Pours it out. Then, glaring defiantly at Crowley- who looks far too entertained for the words coming out his mouth- he takes a too-large swig.

“None. Which you know.”

“I’m sure you’d like some, though. To go buy a book. To find the best restaurants. To... enjoy the new year.” His lips twist into a thin, long line. “We’ve been doing this only once a century because you don’t want anyone up there finding out what you’ve been doing, but what’s to say that anyone _cares?_ Imagine it, angel- the same work, but half the time.” Crowley’s lips flatten, curve upwards. _Not a smile,_ thinks Aziraphale desperately, hands too tight on the goblet. _A smirk._ “You going to call efficiency sloth?”

“Just because Hell doesn’t know doesn’t mean Heaven won’t,” Aziraphale points out, instead of thinking about the flash of Crowley’s teeth. He lets the old, familiar irritation surge through him. “And just because it’ll mean less work doesn’t mean it’s truthful!”

“Honesty isn’t one of your virtues.”

_“Crowley.”_

He spreads his arms. “Five thousand years. Has anyone come down to check up on you? They don’t _care,_ Aziraphale. They don’t. Keep doing what they tell you to do, keep signing off on their forms, keep filling your quotas- they won’t care how you do it.”

“No,” says Aziraphale. He drains the wine and steals the bottle back, pouring another too-large portion again. 

Crowley opens his mouth. 

Aziraphale lets his own voice turn sharper. “No,” he says. “Enough. I’m done talking about it.”

"Angel-”

“A new century,” says Aziraphale, too-stern. He exhales once, short and forceful and irritable, then paints a smile back onto his face. “The twelfth century. Let’s enjoy this night, Crowley. We can talk about work later.”

For a long minute, Crowley doesn’t answer. Then a smile ripples across his face, like a stone through still water. “Tomorrow?”

“Why not?” asks Aziraphale. He takes a deep breath, and holds out the goblet. Waits for Crowley to clink it. “It can’t hurt.”

...

Aziraphale refuses Crowley three times after that.

He mumbles _inextricable_ the first time, slurring the word just enough for it to sound like _ineffable,_ and ignores Crowley’s consternation in favor of the kilishi laid out on his plate like little red discs. The second time, Aziraphale sobers himself up with a snap of his fingers and flees into the colorful crowd of a Plantagenet masquerade, trusting that Crowley will need at least a minute longer to follow him. But Crowley times the third request just perfectly to coincide with Aziraphale’s performance review of the fourteenth century.

Aziraphale refuses him in the morning and spends the rest of the day dodging Crowley’s increasingly petty attempts to catch his attention, ranging from leeks in his soup wriggling eerily like live snakes to a friar who tries to drag him into a church to discuss Original Sin. By the time he ditches the infuriatingly insistent friar and returns home he’s got little electrical sparks fizzling out from his fingers; when he opens the letters left on his doorstep, Aziraphale barely finishes reading the damned thing before it goes up in flames. 

He hasn’t taken his hat off, or his shoes, or his gloves. Aziraphale turns around and strides straight back through London to catch up to Crowley, the charred remnants of the letter still clutched in his fingers.

Why should he go out of his way to _thwart_ when Gabriel apparently still doesn’t understand the difference between the Black Plague and the Ten Plagues of Egypt? When Head Office still doesn’t understand they’ve affected a wholly different population in terms of place, people, _and_ time? How can Aziraphale have faith in them when they’re so absolutely _stupid?_

“Fine,” he says, ignoring Crowley’s scrutiny [12]. “Have it your way. _Once._ And no more.”

Crowley waves his hand and a coin, wide and glittering and bright as his eyes shines between his fingers. “Alright, then,” he says, a smile like a sheathed sword on his lips. “Let’s do it.”

...

Once, twice, a dozen... does it matter?

...

In the Great Fire, Aziraphale is discorporated. 

It’s accidental; he’s saving two sisters from a burning building when a piece of masonry crumbles down on his head. Aziraphale wakes in a clean, empty room with absolutely no pain. It’s the anger that propels him out of the room at first; anger at Head Office and the anger of a man who’s given everything to a cause only to realize it’s worth absolute jack shit to said organization. Aziraphale takes about three steps out of the heavenly clinic before he gets too tired for any sort of confrontation.

Nobody seems to notice or care that he’s not back on Earth already, so Aziraphale decides on a vacation- it’s been more than a thousand years since his last; he’s certainly overdue- and where better than Heaven? He’s toured Earth and is probably [13] banned from Hell, so he should enjoy this.

He hides out in the library for a few weeks until that gets boring [14]- and then he hangs out in the corners with the rest of humanity that’s merited a heavenly afterlife [15]. When he finally tires of that, he spends another couple weeks exploring the parts of heaven that they’d renovated while he wasn’t around. Within two months, Aziraphale’s about stir-crazy enough to finally head over to Gabriel and get his body back. 

He lands in London. 

The air is damp from rain and mold like always, but it’s not currently raining. Aziraphale makes his way through the city, admiring all the things that have changed in the two months he’s been gone. Five and a half thousand years and it took him two months to get tired of heaven all over again; two months and it feels like London’s grown seven inches to the left of where it had once been. The same, and subtly different, all at once.

The city is no longer smoking. It has healed over. People have settled back into their old lives. 

Aziraphale sits down on a bench near the river to catch his breath. _So much_ has changed. Too much. Two months. Just two months. He feels like a stone on a river, worn down smooth and featureless, unimportant, dislodged from its position for the first time in millennia and suddenly flowing along with the current. Aziraphale curls inwards on himself. He feels so- _small._

Then he sees a black-clad figure, kneeling next to a little boy and holding out a piece of candy.

Heart leaping into his throat, Aziraphale lunges forward.

“Crowley,” he cries. 

Crowley almost jumps into the air. Before he can turn around, Aziraphale’s there- he slaps at Crowley’s hands until he drops the candy. Crowley backs off immediately; Aziraphale can see him out of the corner of his eye and thinks Crowley looks like someone who’s stepped off a cliff but found solid ground under him, somehow, impossibly. Relief and shock and the anger at being so terribly foolish as to believe it a cliff in the first place.

There’s such immense emotion carved into his face that Aziraphale cannot bear it. He turns away and catches the wide, shining eyes of the boy, who’s looking more and more like he wants to cry. 

“Here,” says Aziraphale as convincingly as he can manage even as all he wants is the boy to _go away._ “There you go, have another sweet.” He scowls at Crowley, and immediately regrets it; Crowley is fast regaining his equilibrium, but somehow still looks shaken. “One that isn’t _demonic.”_

The boy runs off to his parents, who glare at Aziraphale. And Crowley says, in slightly injured tones, “I wasn’t poisoning him, you know.”

Relief spreads through Aziraphale. At least- at least things are back to normal. When he glances at Crowley, the sunset’s illuminating his face so it looks softer than usual, blurred at the edges like candlewax melted over flame. It takes almost all of Aziraphale’s will not to let his hands shake.

“Then what _were_ you doing?”

“Giving a child a sweet,” says Crowley dryly. “He tripped over my shoes. I thought it only-”

“-nice?”

“Someone’s had to maintain the balance around here. Especially after you disappeared.”

Aziraphale doesn’t flinch at that, but he does feel his lips depress into an involuntary grimace. “What?”

“They’ve been sending your regular notices for the past months. Your Head Office, I mean. _One act of charity, please,_ and all that.” Crowley runs one gloved finger over the knuckles of his other hand, but he doesn’t look away from the river. “Bunch of self-righteous wankers, aren’t they?”

“Hmm.”

“Aziraphale?” He turns, just a little, and there’s flickering tension in his slender figure, whipcord-taut and as dangerous as a promise. “You disappeared for... a long time. I was- confused.”

_So you decided to continue our Arrangement? Even when I just-_

There hadn’t been anything in Aziraphale’s mind when he decided to walk out of the clinic in heaven and just _explore._ Just exhaustion and the desire for a vacation and the numb anger that came with the realization: five thousand years, and nobody cared if he did his job or not.

But Gabriel had been surprised.

Nobody had noticed he was gone.

Crowley had-

“I got discorporated,” says Aziraphale faintly. “In the fire.”

Crowley breathes in. His fingers convulse around his wrist, white. “Angel,” he says.

“I wouldn’t recommend it. Rather- painful. Not a good experience.”

_“Angel.”_

Crowley’s squeezing his wrist so tight it looks like it might well have been broken on a human. Aziraphale reaches out and places his hand over it; he watches as Crowley softens, just a little. 

“I came back,” he says quietly.

“Come back quicker next time,” says Crowley, just as quiet. “I won’t always be there to do all your work for you.”

Aziraphale inhales. The smell is sharp- dampness like freshly turned over earth, and smoke like the ashes of the city surrounding them. The rain after a firestorm. Crowley, standing close enough for Aziraphale to feel the warmth of his skin. London, picking itself up, dusting itself off, readying itself for another long, long day.

He breathes out, and doesn’t remove his hand from Crowley’s wrist.

...

They do try to promote Aziraphale, his Head Office, eventually. He’s been doing good work; it’s only to be expected. It isn’t that Aziraphale isn’t entirely sure of how to answer, but when Gabriel backtracks a few hours later, Aziraphale doesn’t even bother to question him.

He sets out tea for Crowley the next afternoon, brewed with the use of a good three miracles to perfection. 

Beside it lies a slender cloth, silvered and softened. _Tussah silk,_ thinks Aziraphale, letting it puddle through his fingers. Thick but soft, and with little of the burrs that come with wool. Expensive, too, which he can only hope...

“Aziraphale?”

“Tea,” he says, turning away and letting Crowley settle into his customary position. “It’s ready.”

“I’ve some chocolates. From yesterday, but-”

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll be fine.” He’s too nervous. He’s over-compensating. It’s too much. But Aziraphale tilts his head and flexes his fingers and forces himself to calm. “What have you been up to?”

“No good,” says Crowley languidly. “Bit of tempting here, wiling there- deceiving angels and hoodwinking some terrible government officials... all in a day’s work.”

 _Alright, then,_ thinks Aziraphale. _So that’s how we’re doing this._

“Of course,” he hums. “It’s what you do, isn’t it?”

Suspicion flickers across Crowley’s eyebrows. “You sure you’re alright?”

“Just fine.” Aziraphale hands him the cup and sinks into his own chair. He picks up the first chocolate he sees- dark and ribboned through with special caramel- and pops it into his mouth. “Absolutely fine.”

They graduate from tea to wine, and Aziraphale can _feel_ the hours wheeling away around them, but he doesn’t care about any of it. He’s too warm and content, bones softened and lethargy swimming through his muscles. Chocolate and wine and the softness of a chair with two hundred years of use; Aziraphale is more content in that moment than he has been in years. He actually almost forgets to hand Crowley the silk when he gets up to leave.

“They made it wrong,” Aziraphale says airily, taking care not to let his fingers tighten on the cloth even as he sobers himself up as subtly as he can. “And it’s tussah silk, you know, very difficult to dye."

“So whattaya want _me_ to do ‘bout it?”

“Keep it.”

Crowley stands there.

Aziraphale can _feel_ himself flushing at that silence, at the awkwardness and terrible emotion- whatever it is, Aziraphale can’t be bothered to decipher any of it right now- in Crowley’s face. The cloth feels so- so pitiful, small and scant and so _human,_ above all else, so human, to someone who is about as far from human as they can get.

But even all of that would be acceptable, if Aziraphale hadn’t gone out of his way to keep a cloth far darker than anything he’s ever kept in all his existence. He hadn’t thrown a fit at the shopkeeper, hadn’t asked for a replacement; just taken it from a seller in Shanghai more than fifteen centuries previous and kept it in a cupboard for no reason at all.

For no reason at all.

For absolutely no reason at all.

“Or not,” he says slowly, starting to fold it away, a glutinous liquid starting to crawl up his chest. 

Crowley clears his throat. “No,” he says, sounding strange, like something’s caught in his throat, or he’s sobered himself up abruptly. “No, give it over. You know how I get cold in winter, and they keep saying this year’s going to be worse than the last. I can use it as a scarf.”

“It’s a bit lighter than-”

 _“Hand it over, Aziraphale,”_ says Crowley.

He does.

...

Crowley wears it after that. Incessantly [16].

He doesn’t thank Aziraphale, and Aziraphale doesn’t thank him, and none of it matters. There are no words, after all, to explain this. Trust in a person who reason says deserves none of it; faith in a person who’s been repulsed by God; mercy from a demon. 

No words exist, and for all that Aziraphale loves books, loves reading- he’s content with this strange wordlessness. The ineffability of it. The brush of their hands, the twist of their lips, the sharp-tongued slide of their words, always meant to wound in the fashion of a thorned rose. Stinging but not deadly. Uncruel, and lovely.

...

Crowley asks for the holy water on a summer afternoon. 

It’s simple; it’s almost the same place that Aziraphale had met him after getting discorporated. Ducks floating on golden water. London humidity, the air thick in his chest. The itch of the felt hat over his scalp, on just the wrong side of rough. 

The fear is so alive in Aziraphale that he cannot breathe.

He walks away, and it takes him too long to remember that he is an angel. That he need not actually breathe. That magic is his birthright and fire is his blood and Crowley cannot take that away from him.

 _Is it taken?_ he wonders, pacing from front to back long into the night, long past the point at which the candles are extinguished, almost until the sunrise lightens the shop again. _Is it taken, or is it given? And- and does it matter?_

Aziraphale is an angel. He gets to want things. He gets to be...

He getsto imagine a world with Crowley, centuries and centuries upon centuries. A world without Crowley. A world sharper and colder and more dangerous. More colorless. Aziraphale does not like danger [17]. He likes steadiness. He-

He gets to _want._

_Crowley, gone?_ The thought spirals through his head like one of those little children’s wind-up toys. It’s unfathomable. So much of these last few centuries have been spent beside each other- not so much the ephemera of the millennia previous, where they’d met once every few hundred years and been so wary of even that- but that of old friends. They meet up, if they’re in the same city. Same area. Talk about work. Chat about old colleagues and terrible bosses and the commendations each have received from their respective sides. Share the best eating places. Wines. 

“A backup plan?” Aziraphale runs a finger over a dust-free first edition of Dante. “I’m no fool.”

Aziraphale can do without a lot of things in life, for all that he has crafted an existence that holds those things dear; he’s done without wine in those centuries before humanity invented it, without sweets when it was too difficult or expensive to acquire, even without Crowley in those long decades between their meetings. 

But Aziraphale has never existed without the _promise_ of Crowley. 

He has counted years in Crowley’s name, spent decades trying to forget him, passed countless moments staring at the stars and thinking of him in the place of everything else that Aziraphale ought to be thinking of.

He gets to be selfish, damn it all.

In Zemun, Crowley’s hands had been clenched so tight every divot of his knuckles were prominent. Aziraphale had knelt by his side and watched him breathe and swore, silently, fiercely, to make him _better._ Not less of a demon, but more of himself. And it had not mattered then how much Crowley did not wish it, or how dangerous it might become. Aziraphale is an angel, and while Crowley might be a demon, while they might be on opposite sides, Aziraphale will do what must be done. 

“Five thousand years,” he whispers. “And five thousand more. _You_ swore that to me.”

...

The next week, he seeks Crowley out.

Crowley’s angry; his lips are thinner, and there’s a faint haze to the air around him that makes even Aziraphale a little wary of approaching. 

“Well?” he drawls. “Where’s your whole _fraternity,_ angel?”

Despite himself, Aziraphale flushes. “How long’d it take you to come up with that?” he asks, too sharply. He inhales. “And where’s _your_ fraternity, Crowley?”

Crowley is leaning back against the chaise lounge of his home, one that he’d expounded upon in great detail to Aziraphale a few months’ previous [18]; his hair shines prettily against the dark backdrop, and his skin looks even softer and paler in contrast. But his glasses are firmly set atop his eyes. There’s no weakness here that can relax Aziraphale. Just sharp bones and dark cloth and anger, writhing like a living thing.

“Out,” says Crowley coolly.

“What?”

“Get. Out.”

“No,” says Aziraphale. 

“Angel,” says Crowley coldly, “if you don’t leave, I’ll have to make you.”

“And as much as I’d like to see that happen, I came here with another purpose in mind.” Aziraphale blinks at him. Waits for the fall of Crowley’s wrist. The barest twitch of his lips. His mouth feels dry on the inside, sanded and gritty with fear, but Aziraphale _knows_ what’s going on. Knows it well. Too well. He tries to soften his voice with that comprehension. “Did you think I wouldn’t understand, Crowley?”

Crowley tips his head back, slow and lazy, like he’s got all the time in the world in the palms of his hands. “I’m not sure I follow, _Aziraphale.”_

“I spent two months in Heaven when I got discorporated. I was... tired. It happens. I can understand why-”

“I’m not _tired,”_ spits Crowley viciously, all laziness gone in a flash as he jerks upright. “I am worried about-”

“Your people,” finishes Aziraphale sadly. “Coming after you.”

Agitated, Crowley surges to his feet and moves across the dark stone floor. He turns back at the wall, shoulder slicing through air like a blade, neck the jeweled hilt following through. “I _should_ be worried,” he says. “My lot don’t send notes, Aziraphale, and they don’t send warnings. Or have you forgotten Belgrade?”

“Holy water in their hands and blessed knives cutting into your wings,” says Aziraphale. “I’m not going to forget that. Not ever.”

“Then-”

“I’ve taken years off, when I needed it,” Aziraphale interrupts him. “And I’m not saying you shouldn’t be worried- but I know that if you spend every hour here _being_ worried, it will lead to you being even more tired. And exhaustion in demons isn’t all that different from exhaustion in angels, I suspect.”

“And what,” asks Crowley, “does an exhausted angel look like?”

“Like I did, in 1666.”

For a long, awful moment, Crowley doesn’t react. But him not reacting doesn’t mean he isn’t feeling something; Aziraphale braces himself for the fallout.

Crowley doesn’t disappoint [19].

“You think your _exhaustion_ leads you to fucking getting discorporated?” he shrieks, each syllable louder than the last. “You- you fucking- moronic- fucking- exhaustion- _exhaustion-_ you’re- _suicidal?”_

Aziraphale remembers that first millennia, when he’d gone through life basically throwing himself into the worst scraps he could find and getting discorporated through it- he’s died in pretty much every way possible. He also thinks about how he didn’t fireproof himself before walking into a burning building. It would’ve taken only a dash of a miracle, one snap of his fingers. He remembers waking up, staring at a white ceiling, and being unsurprised. Being tired, like a river rushing through him, clogged and dusty and so fierce it left nothing of him behind.

“No,” says Aziraphale carefully. “I _was-_ exhausted. And careless. And that meant-”

“Death?”

“Discorporation.”

“You’re insane.”

“If I am, no more than you.”

_“Insane!”_

“Crowley,” says Aziraphale, fingers clenching and unclenching on nothing. He reaches forwards, almost, but there’s an impassable distance between them. For the briefest of unnecessary heartbeats, the sense-memory of Crowley’s skin rushes through him- the softness, the faint warmth, the long, slender bones pressing back up beneath the flesh, all solid and firm. Instead, Aziraphale swallows. “You need to rest.”

“I need,” hisses Crowley, mouth full of fangs, “you to go away.”

It takes a kind of courage that makes him tremble to think of it, but Aziraphale rests his fingers on the angle of Crowley’s elbow. 

“No, you don’t,” he says quietly.

Crowley sags at his touch. Not much; his spine had been near-vibrating from the tension, but now it’s the stillness that makes Aziraphale feel strangely guilty. His spine curves, just enough that Crowley is silent, and still, and staring into the dark brick of his home like it’s absolutely fascinating. Like he can’t bear to lift his head or look at Aziraphale.

“Sleep,” whispers Aziraphale, heart thundering in his ears. “I’ll handle it.”

Crowley’s shoulders bow towards each other. He looks tired, half-defeated. And that makes Aziraphale, in turn, want to brush his hands up, over his back, down his shoulderblades, smooth the expression from his face and his body, plaster all the ache over with warmth and kindness and all that Aziraphale has, all the miracles dripping from his fingers with light and honey. 

But he finds his stores of courage quite diminished. 

“One week,” says Crowley finally, voice almost soundless. “Wake me up at the end of it.”

“As long as you need,” disagrees Aziraphale. Thinks, heart in his throat, of the time that Crowley had mentioned sleeping for a century. He quails, and then stiffens his resolve: what must be done will be done, and done well besides. “When you’re ready, and no shorter.”

“Aziraphale-”

“Crowley,” says Aziraphale simply. 

Crowley looks up, at Aziraphale. His glasses have slipped; his eyes are slitted through and dimmed, like a kerosene flame on the verge of sputtering. The strip of skin along his nose that sags when he’s asleep looks soft, and tenderness swells inside Aziraphale like a rising wave. He doesn’t know what Crowley sees, only that Aziraphale’s masks have been torn asunder, only that Aziraphale would rather be worn and shattered than have Crowley discorporated and disappeared from his life. He doesn’t know what Crowley sees, but Crowley acquiesces without further argument.

“I’ll handle it,” murmurs Aziraphale, and takes a firmer grip on Crowley’s elbow, and they walk together to his bedroom. “I’ll handle it all.”

...

By the time Aziraphale steps out of Crowley’s home, it’s evening. He looks up and sees the sunset- golden and painting the entire sky as if with a thick paintbrush. The rain has just ended and the clouds are parted, backlit from the sun like two shining wings. The puddles and damp stone glimmers. There’s quiet calm on the street- a gap between rumbling carriages and shouting vendors, the rain tamping down the stink of refuse and rotten vegetables, an unexpected silent peace that leaves Aziraphale’s chest tight and lungs too small.

He clasps his hands behind his back and walks home.

...

It’s a lot of work, of course, being two agents at once.

 _Diligence,_ thinks Aziraphale grimly, settling down to finish his eighth report of the day in triplicate.

...

Multiple wars later, Aziraphale’s got commendations from Heaven for ending them and commendations from Hell for starting them. By the time the 1930s roll around, the filing’s got out of hand; Aziraphale’s got half of Crowley’s documents strewn over his shop and far too many incriminating pieces of evidence for him to be comfortable with any of it. It’s unjustified paranoia that makes him set the perimeter alarms around Crowley’s flat, Aziraphale assures himself, even as he resets it on his weekly visits to make sure Crowley’s not gone and smothered himself in the silk-fringed pillows.

The paperwork has gotten so bad, in fact, that Aziraphale accidentally placed Crowley’s names on the majority of the documents involving his entry into the British Secret Intelligence Service. It takes him two months to even realize the problem, and by then Aziraphale’s got too mired in the mess; he can’t be bothered to fix it back. Crowley therefore becomes a useful pseudonym for a British spy working alone, with a rate of success in disrupting German operations like nobody else- leaving A.Z.-Fell-the-harmless-bookkeeper to develop a relatively successful pipeline of spies throughout Europe to funnel the worst persecuted out of danger. 

Spying is a fulltime job for any human. Spying _and_ becoming a spymaster _and_ somehow mitigating the most extreme of the excesses in a world that seems determined to be the worst it can possibly be- Aziraphale supposes that it’s a good thing he’s never got into the habit of sleeping. It’s ten more hours that he gets to keep on top of work that feels more and more like it’s swamping him whole. 

He’s getting by.

It isn’t easy, but it’s easier than in those cold, terrible years after Eden, when the humans hadn’t been very good at being God’s chosen ones [20] and Aziraphale hadn’t been very happy about being stationed on Earth. It’s what keeps him going through the long, dark nights: the knowledge that _I have gone through worse than this,_ and _I have not quit through any of it,_ and _remember who this is for._

Of course, he doesn’t let himself get discorporated this time. He can’t afford for Gabriel to ask for an account of his miracles, not when a good half of his miracles are layered over one innocuous building in Mayfield. He can’t afford for _any_ of this to be known to _anyone,_ and that means keeping his head down and gritting his teeth and getting the work done, and as dearly as Aziraphale might wish for a cup of tea or sweet wine or Crowley’s sweeter venomous tongue- 

The promise of Crowley waking one morning, he finds, makes it all worth it.

...

1940, late November. 

Aziraphale is in Liverpool, hands reddened as he moves through the wounded, pressing miracles into their skin. There’s screaming and the distant whistle of bombs, the crackle of flame. An air raid shelter hit; people sobbing in the streets. Blood, red and thin on his palms. Sunrise comes and it does not warm his chilled skin.

Sunrise comes, and something unspools in Aziraphale’s gut.

Miracles, fading from existence. A waking that hasn’t been seen in decades. Protections collapsing because that which they are meant to protect has woken.

He stumbles away from the weeping man and his collapsed lungs, and presses his hands to a nearby pipe. Steadies himself against it. Tries to breathe, and then stops, because the stink of blood hangs too heavy in the air.

 _Oh, Crowley,_ he thinks. Tips his head forward, presses it to the pipe, forces himself calm. _Oh, dear boy, you should not wake alone to this._

How the world has darkened. How the world has chilled. How Aziraphale has tossed miracles out, one by one, and thought each a flickering candle to the evil of the abyss. How he wishes he could be there, besides Crowley, and sit beside him for just one night of peace. How he wishes he could tell Crowley: _for eighty years you’ve slept, and for eighty years I have kept you safe, and I-_

Too many words. If he were anyone else, he would return to London and hold Crowley close. Let his fingers be some sort of glue to his old, shattered heart. Let Crowley warm him, in the parts of him that have gone cold. But he is not anyone else, is he? He is Aziraphale the angel, and that is an inextricable, unerasable part of him.

He is an angel, and he has a duty, and he will do that to the bitter, bitter end.

Still, Aziraphale lingers by himself, a bare shadow, ignored by everyone else. He grants himself one breath, two, three. Just long enough to let the longing curl down his spine. Then he breathes in: blood, flame, the distant, aching promise of rain hanging over Liverpool’s salt-ridden rivers. He breathes out, and exhales miracles with the visible puff of air.

...

He returns home, hours later, to an empty flat in Mayfield, all the paperwork miracled away and the furniture swept clean. 

There is no sign of Crowley.

...

Aziraphale tries searching for him, after, of course. But every door slams shut, every window turns tinted, ever clue goes cold. He wonders, briefly, if this was how Crowley felt in the decades before Christ’s crucifixion; he dismisses the idea before it can take root. Aziraphale and Crowley hadn’t been this close then. The Arrangement hadn’t been even a whisper of a thought in either of their minds. Two months later, he gives it up for a lost cause. If Crowley wishes to be found, he will be.

He’s got enough to do, anyhow. The war picks up; Aziraphale gets drawn into it. He’ll meet with Crowley one day, when they get the chance. Until then- Aziraphale has work to finish.

... 

They meet again in a church in London, not quite a year later. Earlier than Aziraphale expected but later than he’d hoped. Crowley looks better; there’s the singing edge of hellfire and brimstone when he walks in, and overlaying it all is mischief like the imp he’s too powerful to be called. He’s softened, thinks Aziraphale; softened and relaxed into himself as he hasn’t been since they first began the Arrangement. As he hasn’t allowed himself to be, since then. Seventy-eight years of sleep have done him a world of good.

He lets Crowley drive him home in the Bentley. They don’t talk about any of it [21]; Aziraphale just watches the mud-smudged city wash him by.

 _All the lies,_ he thinks, after, in the smoky, dusty room of his bookshop. _All the lies we tell._

To their Head Offices. To each other. To themselves.

There are jagged pieces sliced into each of them over these six thousand years. Aziraphale can feel his fit, perfectly, against Crowley’s. It rather terrifies him. It rather entrances him.

...

Aziraphale loves Crowley. Of course he does. Aziraphale loves many things: his books, his tea, his wines, his foods; what is one more? One more indulgence in an existence full of them will not ruin him. And he _does_ love Crowley, and if it is not as graceful or kind or good as he would want it to be, it does not matter.

He will not let it.

...

(And if he knows, wholly, entirely, that Crowley cannot love him back- 

Aziraphale has spent thousands of years smiling at Crowley. Baring his teeth and calling it love. He has spent so long doing what he wishes and naming it differently. So long reaching forwards, grasping at Crowley’s wings and chest and elbow and hand, and never expecting anything in return.

Here is the deepest secret, the oldest secret, the one that has carved itself bloody into Aziraphale’s sinew where once fire and holiness ran bright: this is not a love that demands recompense.

The promise of Crowley is enough.

It has been thus for six thousand years. It will be thus for another six thousand.)

...

Aziraphale hears about the heist in a tiny corner cafe with more ambition than promise. He’s standing to order when he hears two men grumbling over the compulsive _strangeness_ of rich folk. 

“To go, then?” asks the barista irritably, finger hovering over the shiny register. 

“Stealin’ from a church’s _wrong,_ though,” says the second man, and Aziraphale makes his mind up.

“For here, actually,” he says. “And could you add a butterscotch eclair to the order?”

After all, there’s no reason not to enjoy himself while working [22].

...

Aziraphale returns home and locks the doors and starts making tea for himself before he breaks his favorite cup from his trembling hands. The synthetic aftertaste of the eclair sits heavy on his tongue, and Aziraphale slowly sinks into a nearby chair, knees not quite as firm as he’d like.

His first instinct is to go after Crowley. Demand the truth from him. Scare him into inaction. Aziraphale is an angel; it shouldn’t be excessively difficult.

But his second thought is _Crowley,_ who is paranoid but, perhaps, justifiably so. Crowley, who has been hunted by his own people. Crowley, who has probably had hundreds of other experiences of being _unsafe._ Outcast from his own people, fearful of Heavenly Retribution... paranoia is not paranoia if the world really is out to get you.

There had been a spy in Lyon who’d killed himself when he saw Aziraphale. A spy who mistook Aziraphale for a German agent and swallowed cyanide; a man who’d died in Aziraphale’s arms, shaking apart and choking. Aziraphale had been besides Socrates when he took the hemlock, and he remembers well the way his body slowly stiffened and succumbed to death. Viramadevi’s screams as she threw herself on her husband’s pyre for grief and her sister-wives’ lamentations. Qu Yuan, walking into the Miluo with his hands clasped tight around heavy stone. Crowley has seen what holy water does to demons, but Aziraphale has not. He can only imagine something similar: Crowley golden-eyed, terrified, trembling and _dead._

Aziraphale closes his eyes. 

But if he does not do anything, Crowley can get hurt. Will get hurt.

And there is nothing Aziraphale can do to change his mind. Not if seventy-eight years did not have any effect. Not if Crowley is as stubborn as Aziraphale suspects he will be. He’s already not told Aziraphale his plans to get the holy water; it’s only by chance that Aziraphale knows. Next time- if there is a next time- Aziraphale might not get so lucky.

There’s nothing for it, then.

...

The holiest of holy water is made, not just blessed.

Aziraphale gathers a bucket of rainwater in a cold iron bucket. He purifies it with multiple rituals, blesses it twice over, and even manages to trick Michael and Uriel into blessing it themselves. There’s no holier water in all of history.

It’s only after he gives it to Crowley that he actually lets himself panic in the darkened corner of his bookshelf. The fear sits livewire and hot in his belly, rises up to his chest whenever he remembers. He makes six separate customers cry over the next few days, mostly because he can’t believe their absolute gall in daring to want _books_ now. Now, when Crowley has everything he’ll need to-

Aziraphale makes six customers cry, runs through four months’ stock of tea bags, and is desperately considering whether marijuana is _really_ all that much of an indulgence when compared to wine when his door chimes.

“I AM NOT ENTERTA-” starts Aziraphale, before he sputters to a halt.

Crowley’s standing in front of him, coat glittery and hair parted at a dashing angle, shoes polished shining. “You busy?” he asks. Aziraphale stares, and Crowley’s hands enter his pant pockets. He slouches a little further, though his tone doesn’t change. “Because... I’d get it. Even if- you don’t look too. Busy.”

“What?”

“A decent sushi restaurant in Vauxhall. Thought we’d go.”

“Crowley,” says Aziraphale.

It’s on the tip of his tongue: _Can’t you get a hint?_ Cruelty, fury, implacable and ruthless. How Aziraphale ought to protect him. Send him away and protect them both and let this quiet, comfortable companionship fade into the ether as all of Aziraphale’s other friends have gone over the centuries.

Then Crowley says, “I know how you’ve missed the ones made without vinegar.”

Wretchedness sweeps over Aziraphale like a brush over canvas. Like an ocean in a storm, waves swallowing him whole. Crowley- his kindnesses, quiet and strange and soft. His patience. The way he walks away and returns. Time and time and time again. 

“Not so much, no,” says Aziraphale, and knows the wretchedness is too audible [23]. He pauses. “And- I don’t understand. Why are you here?”

“Dinner, angel,” says Crowley patiently. “I owe you. For the- favor. From last week. Now, do you have to do anything to close up or is it just a matter of locking the door?”

Aziraphale says, faintly, “Don’t mention it.”

Something like testiness flashes across Crowley’s face. “It’s good sushi,” he tells him, voice a half-mumble. “You- _we’d_ like it.”

“We can’t keep doing this,” says Aziraphale gently. 

“Your people don’t care.”

“And if your people decide they do, they’ll kill you.”

“Let me handle Hell,” says Crowley, teeth looking slightly sharper than before, shining just a little more. “My people, right? I’m the one who knows about them. Let me handle it.”

“Crowley-”

“I’m a survivor, angel.” It’s unmistakable now; his teeth have lengthened into fangs, slender and long against his red lips. “Six thousand years- how many times have I been discorporated?” Crowley leans forward. “Less than you, certainly.”

_I don’t want you to discorporate. I don’t want you to leave. I don’t want to bear that grief. I don’t think I could bear it. I don’t-_

“I don’t- I can’t-” Aziraphale tries to breathe. Stutters to a halt, and stills. Drags his hands down his face, horrified at his own inability to speak properly. How can he stay with Crowley when, if, if, if-

 _If,_ thinks Aziraphale. _What would I give up for a world of possibilities?_

 _Trust him,_ thinks Aziraphale. _Trust Crowley, because you_ know _him. Crowley is Crowley, is he not? You know him well. Six thousand years too well._

“You’re certain?

He doesn’t _want_ to do this. 

But, oh, there’s nothing he’d like more. 

Absolutely nothing. 

And Aziraphale- he closes his eyes. Inhales. Flame, rain, the quiet ache of loss. Once, Aziraphale had stood on a prairie right after fire had run over it. The earth was scorched black and brown, but shining through the char and dross: golden flowers, bright as the sun. Life after death. Fire had not destroyed it all; it had only been the last part of a cycle, closing the circle whole. 

Those flowers had been brighter than the sun.

Crowley’s eyes are brighter.

“Well, then.” Aziraphale opens his eyes, and feels himself soften: at Crowley’s patience, at _Crowley,_ who he’s known for too long to not want around, who he’s loved too deeply to hurt as he ought. He swallows, and the words come out steadier than he feels them: “Sushi, you said?”

Crowley’s face brightens like a lamp suddenly lit, and Aziraphale silently resigns himself to another hair-curling ride in that stupid Bentley. 

...

Call it coincidence: Aziraphale is in that same sushi shop when Gabriel comes to meet him. It’s all an uncomfortable reminder; they are an angel and a demon, and for all that Aziraphale’s given up, for all the lies he’s told and all the secrets he’s kept and all the things he’s done- Aziraphale is an _angel._

That matters.

It _does._

...

He gives in, hours later, as he always does to Crowley. The worst part of it all is that Aziraphale can’t even bring himself to regret his own weaknesses [24].

...

Gardening is not quite so difficult as Crowley had made it out to be. It takes some discreet miracles and a little more discreet wheedling, but Crowley eventually acquiesces to tend the most finicky plants if Aziraphale will watch over Warlock. Because it gives him some more time to teach the boy to be good, Aziraphale doesn’t bother complaining. 

It’s late one night that Aziraphale hears a loud scrabbling sound. He heads out of the shed-converted-to-a-room to see Crowley hissing inventively at a gardenia bush, hair slicked back and face positively shining in the dark.

“Crowley?” he asks, and has the pleasure of seeing him flinch upright.

“Aziraphale,” he says, biting the edges of the word off like it’s a slippery thing. “You’re... awake.”

“No need to sound so happy to see me.”

“I thought you had business in Suffolk.”

“As an angel,” says Aziraphale slowly, “time and distance do not present the same obstacles to me that they do for humans.”

He does take the time to look at Crowley, though; Crowley’s not dressed in the nanny outfit, and the contrast between the skirt Aziraphale had seen just that morning and the trousers now makes his legs look even longer. His hair’s not so perfectly coiffed and looks like it’s sticking up because of Crowley's natural hair rather than any gel. It’s raining, just a little- the kind that’s halfway between mist and proper rain- and the droplets stand out from Crowley’s hair, glinting like a thousand tiny diamonds in the faint light from Aziraphale’s shed.

“They say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

“Wilde, Crowley?” asks Aziraphale, sighing, though he can’t quite help the spurt of fondness. It’s been so long since he’s seen Crowley without the rigid pleats and corners and perfectly-tamed hair, and even longer since they’ve spoken without an irascible child or multiple people around. “You assured me you weren’t angry about that.”

“I’m not!”

“You quote him more than you talk about anyone else, and that’s including whatever musician’s taken your fancy this decade.”

“You learned the _gavotte,_ you infuriating piece of overcooked cheesecake,” hisses Crowley, folding his arms over his chest. “I missed the first angel to ever dance, all because you didn’t want to wake me up! You danced with _Wilde_ like a- a-”

“-Hoysala courtesan?”

The frustrated edge to Crowley’s gaze softens, marginally. “Never visited that area at that time, actually.”

“Brilliant sculptures. There was this one architect they had- could do things with stone I’d never imagined. Even better dancers, though.” Aziraphale sees the way Crowley’s eyes track to the gardenia bush, the slight shiver wracking his body. “Do you- want to come in? Dry off, maybe?”

“Have to go to Ardennes. Some... garden variety vandalizing, but. Needs a _push.”_

“And you’re here because?”

“Eh. Gardenias are hard to maintain. And you’re terrible at gardening. Have to make sure the soil’s watered properly. Too little and it can’t grow. Too much and it starts _feeling spoiled!”_

He hisses the last, spine twisting to meet the bush and spittle falling on the leaves. 

Aziraphale feels vaguely offended, but only in the form of someone who knows full well they haven’t got a proper defense. He sighs instead. “When are you planning to leave, then?”

“Soon.” Crowley rocks back on his heels. “Once the rain clears up. Thought I could fly there.” He smiles, small and genuine, teeth a little too sharp like he’s forgotten they shouldn’t be that way. “’s been ages, you know.”

“Hmm. Last time for me was...”

“Peru? That whole incident with the snowfall and all?”

Aziraphale shudders, remembering it. It had been a couple decades ago. There hadn’t been any lives lost, thankfully, but explaining away an avalanche he’d caused just to stretch his wings hadn’t been a pleasant experience. 

“Enjoy,” he says, and knows Crowley knows he means _leave me out of it._ “I’ll likely be here when you return.”

“Just two more years.”

“Until we either win, or. Well. Lose.”

“Two more years close to that beerish American diplomat [25]?” Crowley’s lip curls. “I’ll be lucky to want the world to exist after that.”

“Your people chose well.” Aziraphale grins at him, and _feels_ his grin grow when Crowley unbends from his irritated pose. 

“Bah. We all know Heaven hasn’t had good taste since, like, the early days,” says Crowley, eyebrows waggling. “Downhill from Eden, they say.”

“Oh, begone with you!” Aziraphale flicks his fingers, and the sky clears up. He regrets that, almost immediately- the moonlight trickles through to catch on Crowley’s sharp cheekbones, his knife-like hair, his little knobs and buckles and silver contraptions. Aziraphale has to swallow twice before he can speak, and even then he feels a little unbalanced. “Do come back before noon, though. There’s a matinee the mother would like to attend and she’ll notice if Warlock’s nanny isn’t around.”

Crowley rolls his head in a half-nod. “Be back before that, I’d think. Not too difficult to get some grave-defacing or whatever out of my way. I can probably pick up breakfast if I hurry it along.”

“No, better not risk it.” And that’s real regret in Aziraphale’s voice, no matter how much he tries to lighten it. “Dinner, though? Day after tomorrow?”

“That little shop in Iceland we found-”

 _“-I_ found-”

“-a year ago?”

“Haven’t been back.”

“Mmm. I’ll try to fit it into my busy schedule.”

“Try,” says Aziraphale, smiling to remove the sting of the words, and steps back just as Crowley nods, tips his head forward, and launches himself into the air. 

A minute later, he steps forward to the gardenia bush and peers at it. Aziraphale hadn’t wanted to plant it; but Warlock’s father had insisted, and Aziraphale had eventually given in. He’d treated it as a challenge. Hadn’t used any miracles, hadn’t even taken much help from Crowley. Before he left for Suffolk the bush had been on the verge of wilting.

Now it’s positively beautiful, glossy with terror and glimmering with fear. 

But it isn’t that that catches Aziraphale’s eye. 

For as long as he’s known Crowley, as long as he’s seen him with plants, there haven’t been any flowers. Bushes, yes; flowing vines and rich, verdant trees. But no flowers. No colors.

Slowly, Aziraphale reaches out and brushes the soft, soft petal of a gardenia flower, white as his heavenly raiments. 

He makes sure to pay for dinner the next night.

...

Crowley smiles at him. Crowley bares his teeth at him. Crowley is danger.

 _In_ danger? 

Or danger _ous?_

(Five thousand years- five hundred years- ago, Aziraphale might have doubted his answer. Now?

Now.)

...

They lose the Antichrist, and Aziraphale finds him. He fights with Crowley, really, properly, for the first time in centuries. He gets discorporated.

Heaven: Aziraphale stands in shining white, body formless, fear twisting low in his belly, leaving his legs aquiver. There are rows of flickering angels behind the general, each waiting patiently. His thigh is aching, a little, and his head feels like it would be throbbing if it had a physical aspect to it. All he can see is white sky, white walls, white on white on white.

All Aziraphale can remember is fire, turning London to ash and ruin. 

He turns, and feels like he’s drowning. All he can feel is loss, flaring up around him, and the ever-present fear. A reminder that he is an angel, that he is an _angel,_ and that is an inextricable part of him, no matter what else he has chosen to become over six millennia. 

Heaven: a river rushing through him, taking all that he's grown to love and pulling it away like cattails in a current. 

Aziraphale closes his eyes. Breathes, in, out. There is no smoke here, no flame nor rain, nothing that can remind him of Crowley. Only Aziraphale, and Heaven, and all that he is and all that he was and all that he has become.

He opens his eyes, and digs his feet into the river. Stands. 

Stands, firm, and says, “Demons can.”

He is not a stone smoothed down by a river. He is not a cattail, yanked along by a river’s current. He is not an angel subsumed by his Heavenly Duties. He is Aziraphale, the angel who chooses otherwise, who cannot be as he ought to be, and he will do what must be done to save Earth.

He will do what must be done.

He _will._

...

The Bentley explodes. Aziraphale’s hands are shaking, and Crowley is streaked with ash, and the world will end soon, and all Crowley sees is the hunk of metal aflame, battered, broken.

His glasses are gone. His eyes-

Aziraphale feels his throat throb with something too close to grief. He turns away instead of staying beside Crowley. There are things they have to do; there are things _he_ has to do. He will. He must, so he shall. 

_Finish this,_ he thinks, and his hands still. _Finish this, so you can mourn later. So there is time and place to mourn in the future._

...

And still- later- when it’s all over-

Crowley cannot love him. Crowley cannot love. It is impossible.

(Impossible in the manner of a defiant, unFallen angel? Impossible in the manner of an Antichrist who will not destroy the Earth? Impossible in the manner of an angel and a demon standing before their Head Offices, fierce and unbowed and unrepentant?

How can anything remain _impossible_ in this world any longer?)

...

Things happen; the Antichrist lives; the world does not end. Aziraphale settles next to Crowley on the bench, the metal chilled and hard beneath him. He feels so exhausted; in Heaven, Aziraphale had thought his head would be aching if it were physical. Now, he _is_ physical, and it is hurting right behind his eyes like someone’s taken a sledgehammer to the bridge of his nose. He’s so tired, but his limbs are twitching with excessive energy and he can barely find it in himself to stay still.

The body Adam gifted Aziraphale feels _too_ human, in a strange, terrible manner.

He almost doesn’t realize when the bus approaches. It’s Crowley who juggles his elbow and guides him up, and Aziraphale stumbles onto the bus. Sinking into his seat- he actually finds himself half-nodding off.

“The relief, I think,” says Crowley lowly. There’s another two people on the bus- a long-bearded man with a backpack almost as big as him and a college-aged girl who keeps sending wary looks in their direction from over the top of her phone- so he’s keeping his voice quiet until they can miracle their way to Mayfield proper. _Best not to call too much attention to ourselves,_ thinks Aziraphale, a little distracted by Crowley’s shoulder pressing against his own. It nudges him back, a little, and Aziraphale scrapes up the strength to keep himself upright. “Humans call it a crash. Adrenaline crash.” He eyes Aziraphale. “I’m thinking you should, too.”

“How aren’t you _crashing_ then?” asks Aziraphale, more surly than he’d meant to sound, though he can’t quite find it in himself to moderate his tone.

Crowley shrugs, slow and indolent. “You did lose your body and get it back. Tiring stuff, that.”

“And we can’t even rest yet.”

“No.”

For a long moment, neither of them speak. He watches the lamps go by, glowing gold and orange, painting their faces and fading in turn.

“Crowley,” says Aziraphale, helplessly. He feels ugly heat rising through his chest, anxiety and fear like some sulfurous mixture bubbling in his skin. “They’re going to- to-”

“-I know,” says Crowley quietly. 

His shoulder is very warm against Aziraphale’s, and very soft. One of his hands is clutching the wine bottle tight enough to blanch his knuckles. The other rests, preternaturally calm against his thigh. 

“It’s going to be hard,” whispers Aziraphale. 

“We’ve got tonight, I think. And maybe the morning, too, if your lot aren’t too diligent about it all.”

“Choose our faces carefully.”

“Yes,” murmurs Crowley. “We’ve some time, though.” He reaches up and presses a careful hand to Aziraphale’s arm, presses down. “I think you ought to rest. I’ll tell you when we reach.”

For a moment, all Aziraphale can feel is Crowley’s arm, blazing through his coat and shirtsleeves like hellfire. Then the exhaustion catches up to him, and Aziraphale _feels_ his body curl in on itself, darkness wrapping around him like the space between stars, consciousness fading away, and he doesn’t even have time to feel alarmed at the strength or rapidity of the darkness before it’s claimed him. **  
...**

[11] Aziraphale hasn’t returned to the area since Jesus’ crucifixion, but he misses the pistachio soups. And the kebabs. The foods that the people of France and Italy- and, until a few centuries previous, Rome- enjoy have never had the salt that the Babylonians or Mauryans used. And once someone gets used to that flavor... it's very difficult to revert. It’s only the prospect of returning to the memories of Jesus’ crucifixion and all that you’d done to run away those centuries ago that keeps Aziraphale away.

[12] The smoking paper doesn’t faze Crowley; when he got a commendation for the Spanish Inquisition, he’d burned it with the strongest infernal fire he could create. It’s the look in Aziraphale’s eyes that actually bothers him, though he doesn’t know how to comment on it.

[13] Definitely

[14] Aziraphale’s transcribed most of the books in there. He spends a few weeks just enjoying the smells and the look and the feel, but soon enough the novelty wears off, mostly because he’s the only being who’s found the library any shade of interesting in the past six thousand years, and he knows every word written in it. There’s only so much nostalgia _anyone_ can bear before it becomes cloying, even a bookstore-owning angel. Say what you want about humanity, but their sheer inventive spirit was remarkable.

[15] Which is where he begins to truly hate the _celestial harmonies._

[16] Whether as a pocket square, scarf, or handkerchief. As necessary.

[17] This is a lie; Aziraphale _loves_ danger. He doesn’t like seeking it out, which is the whole problem. But the adrenaline? The thud of his heart and song singing out- Aziraphale was and is a Principality. He has led legions in the First War, and he has done his duties well. He likes danger a little bit more than he thinks he should, which is why he avoids any opportunity to seek it out. All while staying with Crowley like a too-bloodthirsty leech. Really, Aziraphale’s been undermining himself since the very beginning.

[18] Crowley imported it from France and had it decked up as outrageously as the sellers would make it. It turned out to be uncomfortable to sit on and delicate besides, and it was only with the use of a miracle that the legs- carved to look like whorls of clouds- weren’t collapsing on the slightest weight. For all that Crowley loathed Rococo art, he’d somehow found himself the owner and designer of a piece that was perhaps the summit of Rococo furniture.

[19] Contrary to all expectation, Crowley doesn’t disappoint. Ever. 

[20] They didn’t develop wines or chocolate or civilization for too long, in Aziraphale’s opinion. The fact that they _eventually_ didis all that’s keeping his faith in an ineffable plan going.

[21] Though, admittedly, Aziraphale is clutching onto his life too dearly in that moment to talk to Crowley about anything. The city might be mud-smudged or scarred-over or even invaded by flying purple rats, but Aziraphale couldn’t have cared less about any of it right then.

[22] Eavesdropping, by any other name.

[23] It’s almost the truth, too. He rather enjoys the novelty of the newer sushi; the tang and salt and flavor of it. But his visits to Asahi all those thousands of years ago mean he likes his sushi plainer than most.

[24] Six years with Crowley? Close enough to spend nights together, to sit and talk and enjoy? Aziraphale finds that almost as alluring as the idea of living past the Apocalypse, which is probably his first sign that he’s a little obsessed. Compromised. Stupid. Call it what you will.

[25] Beerish: _adj,_ rough and bad-mannered while enjoying the advents of beer a little too much. [26]

[26] Crowley has absolutely nothing against beer. He knows where it came from. Humans needed to start fermenting alcohol _somewhere,_ after all, and he’s content with the choices he has now. But beer sticking around? When there’s so many bloody choices otherwise? That, he thinks, is probably the single biggest piece of evidence that he’s seen in favor of an ineffable plan. Or against it. If there's one thing Crowley knows, it's how to twist evidence both for and against an argument.


End file.
